Every Form of Animation

this brick is alive not convinced well what if I did this I I'm going to do a backflip that's going to look so cool bricky what are you boys doing he's going to do a back with Grandma are you convinced now did the brick feel more alive I mean sure it's still a brick that can't move on its own but maybe because I put googly eyes on it and gave it a family you can connect with this brick and it made you feel emotions convincing you that something inanimate is animate is the main goal of

the animate or they're nothing more than deranged frauds for the last century animators have innovated new techniques and styles to this medium taking it from a spinning wheel that doesn't even use electricity to spider-verse and today I'm going to talk about all the processes and innovations that have brought the medium of Animation to right now but first let's go all the way back to the beginning of film when it was all black and white and people had to put up text whenever they talked early on filmmakers discovered a very simple trick to make anything appear

alive in front of a camera and that simple trick was called stop if you're filming something and then stop the camera and then move the thing slightly capture a new image move the thing again and continue to do that a tedious amount of times on the film that thing now magically looked like it move on it own and with this technique you could make literally anything appear to be moving anything but some filmmakers took this art form to an extreme level and created whole characters out of clay and a posable metal wire system called an

AR ature now animators can sculpt unique characters that bend and pose in much more believable ways with stop motion you don't need a hire a real dinosaur or giant monkey to make a movie about a dinosaur or giant monkey I'm sorry you didn't get the job Phil hm you know I just had a crazy idea what if we made our entire puppet's head interchangeable now they can make any facial expression and mouth shape possible we will have to sculpt out hundreds of different heads though but I mean come on that'll be fun that's why we're

extreme baby stop motion movies are still being made and enjoyed to this day and while new technology does help make the overall process easier animators are still using the same techniques that were used on King Kong back in the 1920s where they carefully pose out a character's every movement frame by frame in order stop motion is a medium that I can't even begin to understand how they do let alone make it look good you know having a stopmotion character in gravity defying poses making hundreds of different faces is done solely to make the character feel

more alive and sometimes to help sell the realism animators will mimic quirks that only happen in liveaction films I always chuckle when I see a lens flare in an animated movie cuz like where did you come from there's there's not even a camera lens unlike me though who's always got a camera rolling hey how's it going oh oh no did you catch that did you see the mo look at this lizard eating a bug oh we got him now let's rewind the clip and pause right here this lizard moves so fast that the camera can't

even capture its movements correctly and he transmog fies into an amorphic blob that barely even resembles a lizard but do not fret dear viewer this is called motion blur and it's absolutely natural fast moving objects are hard to see in real life anyway so this blurry blob only showing up for one frame actually helps sell the idea that this little guy is moving quickly if you watch any movie frame by frame you'll find motion blur everywhere and you won't even notice so how do animators who are taking hundreds of still photos handle this naturally occurring

Phenomenon with things in motion easy they'll draw smear animators draw their own blurry blob frame to mimic fast movements bodies can stretch arms can can multiply basically we can sneak in nightmares as long as it's only shown for one frame smears while being very fun to draw can look very weird and Goofy on their own but in the context of the whole shot you barely even notice they're there okay maybe now you'll notice them but that's only because I pointed them out and since animators are bad boys and don't play by the rules they can

make smears out of anything even in stop motion we can sculpt a physical smear frame like how they did in like as ParaNorman which if you haven't seen is going to be your new favorite movie smear frames can be used anytime anywhere unless you were an animator in the 1920s and 30s and you didn't know about him back then in that case you would have been animating something called rub in the 1920s and 30s animators were still figuring out some core principles of Animation turns out there's 12 of them smear frames were used sparingly during

this time with animators usually only drawing character characters with multiple limbs to show Fast movements the stretchy wacky and spiritually ascending smears that you all know and love weren't really used until the 1940s rubber hose characters have noodly almost hosik limbs that bend in all sorts of anatomically defying ways look at Mickey Mouse's noodle arms that I can now legally show you the reason characters look like this is because drawing noodle arms and not worrying about Anatomy is easier to draw but like just cuz something has noodle arms doesn't mean it's bad you guys what

these animators were able to accomplish with the technology if you could even call it that is nothing short of dark magic and the very same Studio that made Steamboat Willie wanted to push the envelope and show the world that animation could be more it doesn't just have to be noodly characters with Pac-Man eyes they were going to animate a realistic woman with proportional arms that don't move in weird exaggerated ways and oh God her noodle arms are moving in weird exaggerated ways in 1934 Disney released a short called the goddess of spring being their first

attempt at animating a character with what was supposed to have real human anatomy they still had a lot to learn obviously now animating a quote unquote anatomically correct human is actually a much harder task than you might realize and that's because of the uncanny valley as characters get more and more human characteristics we hit an interesting point right here when something looks almost like a human but is just a little off our pattern recognition brain start setting off alarm bells and go something is definitely wrong with that almost human I am entering fight or flight

right now so if you're trying to make something look as close to a human as possible but are just a tiny bit off everything crumbles the goddess of spring was still good practice for Disney because only 3 years later they released the world's first fully animated feature film Snow White can you really blame Disney for going six times over budget to make this movie I mean just look at how these human characters are moving 10 years before Snow White animated humans looked like this so going from this to this in only 10 years how I

can't get over how real these human characters look sometimes almost too real well I think you're old enough to learn about the dangers of R rotoscoping is the process of taking real life footage and then manually tracing over every frame resulting in an animation with unreal levels of realism and I say unreal derogatorily you're basically slapping a cartoon filter over live-action footage but instead of Simply slapping you're spending multiple hours doing mindless and tedious drawing rotoscoping is not the same as filming a human actor and then later referencing that footage like what Disney did for

Sleeping Beauty or aliceon Wonderland or any movie ever because animators use references all the time people had figured out how to rotoscope other people long before Snow White so of course Disney who is trying to convey real human movement rotoscoped some shots the problem with rotoscoping is that we start to sneak our way back to the bottom of the uncanny valley animated characters often do and should break the laws of physics they can squash and stretch into weird proportions and be drawn in unique and interesting poses and look Snow White is still a masterpiece of

a movie The rotoscoping is fine you barely notice it it's it's good it's a good movie and it made Disney a lot of money also how did Walt animate these shots of things reflecting in the water in 1937 what did they put special glass over paintings to make it look distorted or something who would be crazy enough to do that if you made a whole movie entirely rotoscoped what you end up with is Ralph fact she's the Lord of the Rings notice anything off about these characters movements look at how Gandalf moved just a year

ago in The Hobbit now Lord of the Rings Hobbit Lord of the Rings almost every shot in this movie was rotoscoped and the shots that weren't used liveaction footage with a filter over it I'm not saying that rotoscoping is bad you just have to use it correctly a character switching from traditionally animated to rotoscoped is incredibly fun and always will be the YouTuber Joel Javier makes very entertaining rotoscope skits that feel like a fever dream and I mean that under derogatory and a lot of music videos get away with rotoscoping because admittedly rotoscoping is a

very cool visual now I wish I could say the first Lord of the Rings movie was a hidden animation gem but I don't know it wasn't it's not on my top 10 I'm sorry it probably made a lot of nerds in the 70s happy but thankfully the Lord of the Rings has been adapted into many other forms of media like video games Magic the Gathering cards and anime anime they're making a Lord of the Rings anime they're making a Lord of the Rings anime you thought Hollywood California was the only place in the world making

moving pictures Japan's been making their own moving pictures too and some of them are moving drawings there are entire college courses on the history of anime but you're not paying me tuition so we're going to have to skip over a couple things a lot of of early anime is now lost media because Cinemas didn't preserve film back then and an earthquake destroyed many studios in 1923 some Japanese animators created shorts out of paper cutouts because buying thousands of Celluloid sheets was too expensive and they had some very unique character designs and some Japanese animators took

inspiration from Disney and made shorts that looked very similar to America's rubber hose characters then by the 1940s some major world events happened that got most of the world involved and both American and Japanese animation Studios were affected but after all that in 1948 one studio called Japan animated films later bought out by Toe animation set out to be the Disney of the East and they made cartoons about magical school girls and are still in business to this day and made some other less popular shows one animator who quit working at towy created his own

company and made an anime based off his comic about a robot boy hey I kind of like that art style of drawing humans with big expressive eyes let's let's do more of that that same year another Studio made an anime about humans controlling giant robots I wonder if that's going to inspire a whole new genre and this guy was commissioned by American Studios to make stopmotion Christmas movies like Rudolph the redn Reindeer meaning Rudolph is Anime n by the 1960s Japanese shows started airing on televisions all across the globe and they continued to make unique

and interesting stories with amazing animations they were beloved by billions of people and grew into extremely profitable franchises like I'm talking the most profitable franchise by the 1970s Disney was still very much the animated movie gold standard making big budgeted movies with familyfriendly values which is fine to do kids love bright colors and talking animals that only cartoons can offer but some studios realized that animation was a medium not a genre and made animated movies exclusively for adult that's part of the reason why the first Lord of the Rings movie was entirely rotoscoped it wasn't

trying to be cartoony and overthe toop it was trying to be real and gritty animation could be anything for anyone of any age but really if you think about it there hadn't been a new way of showing people moving drawings since those very early days of black and white stop motion in stop motion you take a picture move a figure take a picture move a figure in cell animation you take take a picture move a cell take a picture move a cell everything's just been a series of pictures moved manually in front of a camera

this whole time always has been You've Got Mail oh it says the entire animation and film industry is about to be flipped onto its head forever and ever yeah right I'm sure this whole computer thing is just a f with the ever increasing advancements of Technology we were able to achieve increasing L Advanced achievements like putting a guy on the moon and drawing silly little cartoons more efficiently gone are the days of having to physically draw everything out on paper and underpay a team of hundreds of pretty girls to hand paint every frame now we

can use this fancy new computer to render everything out for us all we have to do is create a real life mold of our real life human hand then draw 350 triangles onto that hand then manually measure out the x y and z coordinates of 800 different data points no come on this is going to be so much faster put that pencil down now we just program in a couple of key frames and we get huh we still don't have the processing power to render everything out oh I know we'll just point this long exposure

camera at the computer screen get these art supplies out of here this is the future and when everything's finished rendering we'll get this a whole human hand moving on its own own without having to draw a single frame this process is exactly what Utah University student Ed katol did in 1972 And while it might not have been more efficient than drawing everything out by hand it showed that computers were capable of rendering out three-dimensional animations this was made after we landed a man on the Moon by the way so don't tell me this was CGI

as the computer's processing power grew exponentially more and more filmmakers started seeing the benefits of using computer generated images in movies a decade after catl digitized his hand films like Tron showcased characters racing on mindboggling computer generated light cycles this might look you know bad by today's standards but these Graphics were something that audiences had never seen before plus the movie takes place inside of a computer so this is probably what people thought the insides of a computer look like anyways at the time computers did a great job at creating rigid geometric shapes and animators

Ed that to their advantage characters would still have to be animated traditionally on cells but objects that weren't going to change shape like black cauldrons could now magically fly in circles around our characters Disney really showed off the computer's rendering power during the climax of The Great Mouse Detective when these two rodents fought each other inside a clock tower and all the spinning gears were generated by a computer animators can now make any complex shape move in a three-dimensional space without having to draw a single single frame I mean you know except for the characters

they they still very much had to draw Those computer Graphics were here to stay as Disney integrated more of them into movies like these cars in Oliver and Company or Eric ship in The Little Mermaid and then they stopped using cells entirely starting with The Rescuers Down Under Disney no longer used cells and made movies entirely digitally with a program called caps so if you ever wanted to own a cell of Joanna the lizard eating an egg that's too bad because they don't [ __ ] exist which [ __ ] sucks because Joanna was the

best God lizard Disney ever made don't touch me TV shows and Anime still use cells till about the year 2000ish but eventually everyone switched to digital now to color a frame all you had to do was so computers were great at making rigid non-flexible shapes but has anyone ever tried to make a computer a group of computer scientists who are working for a small Indie director named George Lucas were taking this art form to an streem level and created whole characters completely generated by a computer then a small entrepreneur named Steve Jobs hired Those computer

scientists and made his own company Pixar yes Steve Jobs was one of the founders of Pixar and he originally created the company to sell a high-end computer powerful enough to render 3D animations but no one bought the computer because it cost $135,000 so the team scrapped the computer selling idea and just stuck with making computer generated carto Tunes but they soon discovered a unique problem the computer had a hard time getting textures right and everything including babies ended up looking like it was made out of plastic so the team's clever work around this dilemma was

to make a movie with the entire cast of characters actually made out of plastic or ants you know people don't know what ants are supposed to look like it's it's fine Pixar continued to develop new processes to get the computer to generate unique textures and lighting like simulating human hair or fur or lighting things in such a way to make everything appear underwater no other Studio was pioneering computer generated images like Pixar was and then in 2006 Disney bought Pixar but I don't think Steve was too upset because one year later he achieved his dream

of selling a high-end computer this time being a little more affordable a little now I want to squash any misconception that computers do all the animating animators still have to manually pose a character's body in facial expression off of a character's animators will build a complex system of nodes and bones that let them manually pose a character into any position possible it's kind of like a digital stop motion puppet or an actual puppet without any of the strings all CG characters are just their own complicated version of Pinocchio using character rigs is really the only

way of animating things in three dimensions but it's not like we can use rigs in 2D animation here in the second dimension we don't have a fancy Z axis 2D animation can only be done by handrawing 24 new images every second except we don't I lied even all the way back when characters were animated with paper and cells animators wouldn't draw a whole new frame every frame usually they would animate pieces of a character and paint each piece on its own cell you remember Robin they only Drew one body and five different heads but because

cells are a physical object that get harder to handle the more you have animators could only break a character up into two or three different pieces but now thanks to the computer we can break up a character into as many pieces as we'd like like four or five or 173 have you ever played around with the free and revolutionary animation software pivot stick figure animator if you're the type of person that says oh I suck at drawing I can't even draw stick figures then you're going to love this program on pivot you're given a pre-made

stick figure or horse that have these joints that can be posed however you like each of these stick figures limbs are just individual pieces that are connected in such a way that make it look like a stick figure so to make these animations we're not really drawing anything we're just manually posing out a character like a digital Puppeteer I wasn't saying you can make a rig out of 173 Pieces Just to be funny because that's how many pieces I'm made out of that's right me even I'm a rig and can I tell you a secret

most TV shows use rigs too of course handdrawn traditional animation is still used to make these shows it's not a lost art form or anything but rigs are super useful at making still pretty high quality levels of Animation but at a much cheaper cost and as we all know TV animation has to create more animation per budget but maybe rig animation still isn't as cost effective as you'd like and maybe you're not a fan of the complicated puppet look and you want something that looks more human well there's one more animation process we can try

called motion if we put an actor inside one of these dorky pingpong suits a computer can pinpoint and record that actor's exact movements now we can take those movements slap a cartoon character's model over it and we get an animation that looks like sh motion capture is the rotoscoping of 3D animation it cuts costs but the results are too human and we back at the bottom of the uncanny valley that's why the kids from The Polar Express look so nightmarish because they were following the exact movements of Tom Hanks yes Tom Hanks the adult man

did some motion capture for the small nameless herob boy from The Polar Express there's probably a reason we haven't made a fully motion capture cartoon in over 10 years because it looks weird but I mean that didn't stop one of these movies from winning an Oscar in animation and before you ask no it wasn't monster house or Tintin it was Mars need's moms duh just like rotoscoping motion capture can be used correctly computer-generated characters acting side bys side real human actors look decent it's not that jarring that these creatures who exist in a live-action world

are moving just like live-action people and let's not forget all the vtubers who use motion capture technology to bring their jiggly assets to life no matter what method someone uses to try and convince you that something else is alive I think is incredibly cool and I hope you think it's cool too but maybe you don't think it's cool and you don't care about animation and you just put this video on in the background while you were cleaning that's totally fine I do that all the time I just like learning about how all my favorite animated

pieces of media get created because it's not always the same process and I think it's great that new technology is allowing anyone to express themselves in whatever way possible a person expressing themselves those are the three key words here from the big studios that are just now pioneering new and interesting styles with digital animation to the Indie Studios that have access to incredible technology which allow anyone working from their bedrooms in their pajamas to create some truly masterpieces of Animation so if you're the type of person that likes to trick people into thinking that something

is alive then you deserve all the respect in the world in fact here are some cool people that made the animation in this video possible hello you just made it to the end of this video I hope you enjoyed it I'm still trying to figure out this vtuber model so I'm over enunciating my words the technology behind this is beyond my comprehension if you're still deciding what to get for the holidays then great news we have mystery boxes over on my website so you can leave the deciding up to us now if you'll excuse me

I'm gonna go take a nap are you still watching oh yeah she's coming back